I am too lazy to maintain a blog but I wanted to share my thoughts on the ISC so I thought that this is the next best place I can do that.

I was participating at the ISPC after a gap of one year in 2017 with the WSPC happening in India. This time I had more practice than I ever had in the last five years especially with respect to sudoku. I reached early on Saturday morning and met a lot of puzzle friends after the WSPC last October and some new acquaintances as well. After a brief introduction session and a small Q&A session we got right into the puzzle solving.

The first round was 10 classics which I usually don’t do well on. I started from the 4th puzzle and started working my way upwards and ended up on the 9t puzzle for a total of 225 points from a potential 350. I got stuck on the 9th puzzle but I liked the puzzle as it repeatedly used hidden pairs.

I hoped to cover some lost ground in the second round. I started with Next to 9 and powered through it although it did not have an easy start. Next I went to the Little Killer and got a start very quickly but wasted a lot of time breaking the puzzle and ignoring a few of the outside clues. I soldiered through the irregular and the substitution puzzles. I got a good start in the slot machine sudoku but broke it in the end. Eventually I did not have enough time to complete the palindrome sudoku with a few digits left. I had underperformed on the most important round and ended up with 400 points from a potential 750. I loved the palindrome sudoku and the odd sum pair which I solved after the event.

The third round was post lunch and consisted of two samurai sudokus. I started with the variants samurai which I found to be easier than the classic samurai and finished it off quickly. The classic samurai had more linking between the grids and took me a bit longer. For the first time I was under pressure to complete the round fast and try to get more bonus. After a minute of checking for blank cells and obvious mistakes I submitted with 3 minutes bonus. After the round Kishore pointed out that a dot was missing between a 3 and a 6 in the Kropki sudoku. I had not noticed it as it came in the very end of my solve when I was only looking to satisfy the Classic rules. I think the organizers made the right decision to scrap this round from the final tally.

I liked the concept of the fourth round which had 9 sudoku which were linked as 3 triplets, one triplet having the same central row, one with same central column and one with same central box. I went in with a strategy of starting with Trampoline and Queen Sudoku as I felt those were the most constrained puzzles to create. In the first few minutes of the solve I realized an important strategy to focus on the central cell. As irrespective of whether the triplet is linked based on row, column or box the central cell will be the same within a triplet. With this strategy identifying the triplets became very easy and I quickly went through all other puzzles and after a quick scan submitted with 16 minutes bonus.

Overall I was satisfied with my performance and felt that I was able to be competitive for the first time after 2007 and with a little more practice I can aim to make it back to the Indian team.
An added bonus was winning the Best Authors prize along with Kumaresan for the Odd Even and Substitution round. I was not aware that we had won the prize and was mentioning to Prasanna that there should be a trophy for this category as well :P

Thanks to all the authors for putting together a wonderful set of puzzles which were at the appropriate level of difficulty for the Indian Sudoku championship. There were many memorable sudokus and moments which I will take away from the event. Also thanks to the organizers for stepping up and volunteering to sit out of the event and to take care of all logistic aspects required to make the event successful. Thanks for setting up the wonderful venue and awesome meal arrangements. You guys have set the blueprint for future organizers to try and emulate.